New Books in Eastern European Studies

As they worked on the second edition of What is Europe? (Routledge, 2022), Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruby Gropas admit that they struggled to keep up. The problem wasn't just the pace of change since 2015 in the EU - the resolution of the Greek and onset of the refugee crisis, Brexit, pandemic and war - but what each of these did to the concept of "Europe" itself.  In their history and sociology of...

Professor Martin’s A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (Yale, 2022) is a survey of Early Modern European history from the Age of Discovery to the French Revolution with two important distinctions. First, Professor Martin views modernity through the enduring dream of the Apocalypse (which he calls the “stamp of modernity,” 250); second, he compares the...

An alienated society divided into groups and classes suspicious of one another does not pose an especially great problem for an authoritarian regime that does not legitimize itself through fair elections. In contrast, democratic institutions presuppose a consensus about obeying common “rules of the game” and rely on a culture of trust and reciprocity. For democratic consolidation, citizens must re...

President Vladmir Putin – the son of a foreman at a railway carriage works – is today one of the most powerful individuals on earth. What drives him? What does he want his legacy to be? Was he once a liberal? What is he now? After 22 years in power what do we know about him. The Western press often portrays him as an irrational monster – how does he see himself? Owen Bennett Jones speaks to Philip...

The leadership of Hungary and Poland seemingly shared the same playbook when it came to undermining judicial independence, consolidating electoral power, regulating media ownership and enacting laws against LGBTQ rights and abortion. They also work together to push back against the European Union's efforts to sanction member states pursuing illiberal reforms. However, since the Russian invasion of...

Unequal under Socialism: Race, Women, and Transnationalism in Bulgaria (U Toronto Press, 2021) examines the formation of racial, gender, and national identities and relations in the socialist state. With a specific focus on Bulgaria, a former socialist country in the Balkans, the book traces the intertwined local and global forces driving racialization, socialist state policies, and Eurocentric Ma...

The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews...

With Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories (Amsterdam UP, 2022), Orli Fridman traces the emergence of memory activism in the aftermath of conflict and war, with a focus on Serbia after the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The study offers in-depth accounts of memory activism both on-site and online, analysing the evolution of this practice in the context of generationa...

Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (Ohio State UP, 2022) offers a fresh perspective on the role of popular culture in the one-hundred-year history of the Polish state, from its foundation in 1918 to the present. Drawing on dozens of press articles, interviews, and readers' letters, Ewa Stańczyk discusses how journalists, artists, and audiences used comics...

The EU, writes Loukas Tsoukalis, is “a strange vehicle … unlike any others on the roads of the world, surely not a flashy vehicle – rather slow and not easy to drive. However, it has been able to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of passengers and covered a remarkably long distance – often in adverse conditions and with accidents on the way”. However, while the union has shown itself to be resil...

Every Russian knows him purely by his patronym. He was the general who triumphed over Napoleon's Grande Armée during the Patriotic War of 1812, not merely restoring national pride but securing national identity. Many Russians consider Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov the greatest figure of the 19th century, ahead of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, even Tolstoy himself. Immediately aft...

The Western coalition supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia has so far been thought to be solid and reliable, but there may be vulnerabilities in that support. Even as Russia seems to be in disarray on the battlefield and elsewhere, it's been believed all along that Vladimir Putin would use his control over oil and gas resources on which Europe depends to assert leverage over the West in the c...

When Russia occupied the Crimea in 2014, a term appeared called “hybrid warfare” to describe the doctrine and strategies of the Russian military. One consistent issue was that there was never any consensus on what exactly "hybrid warfare" even meant other than a novel use of military and non-military means to undermine and defeat an enemy nation. What exactly is “hybrid warfare” and are the Russia...

In God, Tsar and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois UP, 2020), Dr. Daniel Rowland collects close to 50 years of scholarship, between two book covers. The de facto mandate on Russian tsars to take advice, and the importance of biblical and liturgical imagery to Muscovite political culture, are among the important themes emerging from this collection of scholarsh...

Alexander Kirshner’s book Legitimate Opposition (Yale UP, 2022) can be seen as a reaction to the politics of Donald Trump and the questions he has raised about the nature of modern democracy. Advocates of western democracy have traditionally pointed to the role of the opposition in holding government to account. The deal has been that oppositions can criticise those in power without going to jail...

In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light.  In The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2017), Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 t...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Catherine Baker’s fascinating new book poses a deceptively simple question: what does race have to do with the Yugoslav region? Eastern European studies has often framed the region as unimplicated in global formations of race, while still remarking on the conditional positioning...

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when...

In Russia in the Early Modern World: The Continuity of Change (Lexington, 2022), Donald Ostrowski takes on the long-lived narrative that Peter the Great's reign constituted a pivot point in Russian history. Before Peter, this narrative generally says, there was continuity and even stagnation; after the Petrine Revolution, however, was dynamism, Westernization, and so on. Thoroughly documented and...

In For the Faith, Against the State: Old Calendarism in Romania (1924-1936)* (De Gruyter, 2022), Andreea Kaltenbrunner uses Old Calendarism, a movement of orthodox believers against the introduction of a new church calendar, to show that the formation of the state and nation in "Greater Romania" also produced tensions among ethnic Romanians living in Bessarabia, which had been ruled by the the Rus...

From Austria to New Zealand, coalition governments often pave the road to foreign policy. In Western Europe, nearly 90 percent of postwar governments include two or more political parties. Israel, the Middle East’s only consolidated democracy according to many, has never experienced single-party rule in its history. Even the United Kingdom, known for its long streak of single-party rule, now navig...

How does violence against civilians become permissible in wartime? Why do some communities experience violence while others do not? In her new book, Mila Dragojević develops the concept of amoral communities to find an answer to these questions. In Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dragojević studies how, in places where ethnic and political ide...

The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the long eighteenth century. Though the Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, A Spiritual Revolution argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observer...

Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Cornell UP, 2022) explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes...

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Th...